The Hand of Glory- Part One

Fate. Destiny. Kismet. Karma. The belief that Something Else controls
our future; the fear that the future is in reality totally out of
control. Within us all there is the uncertainty of what lies awaiting
us in the years ahead; while at the same time we are plagued by the
unsettling fear that something from the past may come back to haunt
us.  For some people there is the comfort of spiritual belief; and yet
for all of us at some time during our tenuous lives there lies the
suspicion that those spiritual beliefs to which we so desperately
cling  may only scratch the surface of the reality of whatever puppet
master is really out there tugging our strings and controlling our
dance through life. So girdled with false courage we reach out to
grasp the Hand of Fate, and while that hand in turn reaches out to
touch all of us, the more elusive Hand of Glory is known to only a
few. And when it reaches out it is completely and frighteningly
different than its name would let on. Just ask Chris Evans – Outlaw; a
man in whose life both the Hand of Fate as well as the Hand of Glory
took active roles; a man whose life can certainly be described as
fateful, yet a life to which the term of glorious would never be
applied. But to understand why the Hand of Glory became a frightening
part of his life, we must first go back several years to understand
how the Hands of Fate and Glory steered his journey to that painful
crossroad.

Chris Evans was born back East in the year 1847. He decided to take
his destiny into his own hands at the scary age of just fourteen years
and ran away from home, making his way West, pausing in his travels
occasionally to take on add jobs at farms and ranches but never
tarrying for too long in any one place, always desiring to make his
way closer to his goal – California. It took him many long years and
more than a few detours to finally arrive in the Golden State. But
although he had heard about the legends regarding those endless piles
of gold just lying around waiting to be picked up, Chris had decided
long before his arrival that he didn’t want to spend his life chasing
dreams; panning for gold in the freezing mountain streams or digging
endlessly in the pitch black darkness of some bottomless hole in a
mountainside, chasing phantom riches. He knew instead that he wanted
to be on top of those mountains; high up in the Sierra Nevada; as
close to heaven as he could get with the world at his feet. So he made
his way up to that very place; to an area which is now part of Kings
Canyon National Park. The Hand of Fate had only to gently brush him at
this point, and the Hand of Glory was still far, far away.

Evans soon got a job falling trees – Big Trees, Giant Sequoias – and
he was good at it, too. As the years went by – it was the 1870’s now –
he taught the trade of tree falling to a lot of the younger men making
their way into the mountains in search of employment.  Falling trees
was hard, even backbreaking work. The loggers worked ten to twelve
hours a day, six days per week. It would often take two men working
each end of a saw a week or more to fall a single giant tree. But
Evans had the strength, the patience, and the stamina to stick with it
for many years before he left the mountains and made his way down to
the San Joaquin Valley to try his hand at a different kind of work.
But when Evans left these hills he also left behind many friends; men
who would remember him and come to his aid when Fate would later
demand his return to the High Country
.
Down in the San Joaquin Valley Chris got a job as a teamster and met a
wonderful woman named Molly. Molly – quite young by more modern
standards at the mere age of fifteen  – was considered a woman and
eligible for marriage according to the social mores of the time. At
twenty-seven Chris was several years her senior, but the two fell in
love and entered into a brief yet intense courtship. Molly’s parents
gave their blessing and in 1874 she and Chris were married at
Rattlesnake Ranch, the Byrd family home which was located about
fifteen miles north of Visalia. Chris owned a piece of property near
Dry Creek, but instead of moving there with his new bride he worked
out a trade for land higher up in the mountains; one hundred and sixty
acres in what is now known as Redwood Canyon in Kings Canyon National
Park. He and Molly named the place their Redwood Ranch. They moved up
there to what they felt was going to be their own personal Garden of
Eden to make it their home, and Molly became pregnant with the first
of what would eventually be nine children. But after a riding accident
the baby was born prematurely and died within a day. Baby Eugene was
buried there at Redwood Ranch, beneath a giant Cedar tree next to a
small spring of running water, and rests in that grove of Sequoias to
this day next to a cousin who also died as an infant.  The marker on
that grave has long since disappeared, but the remains of their first
child still lie somewhere in Redwood Canyon even after Time has erased
all physical memories. The search for work soon led Chris to cross the
Sierra on foot to Inyo County, while Molly remained at Rattlesnake
Ranch and gave birth to their second child several months later. When
he returned from the eastern side of the Sierra Chris, Molly and the
baby moved back to the valley, then to San Francisco, Seattle, and
back again to California to start a farm near a place called Mussel
Slough. Although it went unnoticed at this time, this nudge from the
Hand of Fate which led them to Mussel Slough was anything but gentle.
It was the touch which changed the course of his entire life.

Mussel Slough was land which was owned by the Southern Pacific
Railroad. But the Southern Pacific invited farmers onto the land to
start farms, telling them the railroad would sell them the land after
they had improved it. Many families, including the Evans, did just
that. Yet the dire events of the near future would soon prove that
this may not really have been the best career decision any of them had
ever made, and perhaps Chris had a foreboding of those events, and
that may have been why he moved his family away from Mussel Slough
before it turned into a deadly quagmire.

So Chris moved west to Adelaide, and the children kept coming, eight
more in all after the passing of baby Eugene – Eva, Carl, Elmer, John,
Joseph, Louis, Winifred, and Ynez. Around the year 1880, while Chris
and Molly were peacefully ranching and making babies over at Adelaide,
trouble erupted at their former home of Mussel Slough between the
farmers and the Southern Pacific Railroad, and although they weren’t
involved in that fighting the Southern Pacific branded Chris as a
troublemaker because he had friends at Mussel Slough who had taken up
arms against the railroad.  Six of those friends – six farmers – were
killed in the battle that followed between them and the squad of
Southern Pacific railroad detectives who had been sent out by the
railroad to clear the farmers off the land; to free the land up for
sale to other investors at a much higher price than could be gotten
from the farmers. The Southern Pacific was a powerful force in
California in 1880. They had their own private army of railroad
detectives, and they were ruthless in using them. The Battle of Mussel
Slough was a massacre.

When Molly, Chris and the children moved back near Visalia in 1882 to
start a farm, Chris was still on the railroad’s Hit List. So the
Southern Pacific began stationing some of their railroad detectives
near the Evans’ farm to keep a close watch on Chris and his family, a
vigil which persisted for years, day and night. In fact one of those
detectives, a man by the name of Will Smith, got to watching them so
closely that he decided that he had fallen in love with Chris and
Molly’s eldest daughter, Eva, and that he wanted to marry her. But
Eva, even though she was only a young lady of fourteen years, was a
young lady who knew her own mind. She told Smith that she wanted no
part of Southern Pacific men in general and no part of him in
particular. She used language that was quite colorful and descriptive,
and Smith immediately became the butt of rude jokes from his fellow
detectives as well as from the local sheriff and his deputies. Smith
fumed, and quietly vowed revenge for this repudiation by this arrogant
farm girl.  Again, Fate’s persistent movement of Chris’s life
generated ripples which would later wash back upon him as an angry
tide.

When the train robberies started happening in the San Joaquin Valley
in the late 1880’s, the Southern Pacific decided that they would point
the finger of blame at Chris and his friend John Sontag, even though
they didn’t have a shred of evidence that either of them had ever been
involved; even though they knew for a fact that the Dalton Gang had
committed at least some of those train robberies. Typically a gang of
masked men would board a train at a water stop, hold the train’s crew
at gunpoint, blow open the baggage car with dynamite, and then ride
off into the night with whatever spoils they could get and disappear
before the train could make it to the nearest town to raise the alarm.
This was the typical method of operation of the Dalton Gang, and one
of the Dalton boys had already been arrested and charged with train
robbery. Chris’s friend John Sontag had once worked for the Southern
Pacific but had lost his job when one foot had been badly injured in
an accident at work and as a result he could no longer move fast
enough for his bosses at the railroad, so he was fired. He then went
to work on the Evans’ farm doing odd jobs for Chris and Molly. The
Southern Pacific apparently thought they made the perfect pair of Fall
Guys – the Evans and Sontag Gang, they labeled them - and they told
the sheriff that they wanted them arrested. That’s how powerful the
Southern Pacific was in the late 1880’s – they could order a man’s
arrest without that man having ever been charged or convicted of a
crime. And the sheriff was in a situation where he either had to obey
or face losing his job, so he rode out to the Evans’ farm with that
railroad detective, Will Smith, to carry out his orders.

On a fateful day when Molly wasn’t home a railroad detective with a
festering grudge accompanied by a sheriff who did not have the courage
to question his orders rode up to the family farm, dismounted, and
walked into their living room with their guns drawn. No knock; no
warrant; no evidence. The oldest daughter, Eva, ran out the back door
to tell her father that two men were in the house threatening to
either arrest him or shoot him. Unable to tolerate this threat to his
family in his own home Chris picked up his own gun and went into the
house to confront the two men who were no better than intruders in his
eyes. Shots were exchanged and the railroad detective and sheriff took
off back to town at full speed. In fact, they ran out so fast that
they ran right by the horses they had left tied up in front of the
farm and ran all the way back to town. Chris and John had a good laugh
at this, but they knew the sheriff and detective would be back, and
that they would bring a posse with them. So they packed up some
supplies and took off for the mountains, back to the security of the
Redwood Ranch, but leaving Molly and the children behind for their own
safety should gunfire erupt around them once again.

Molly Byrd was now thirty years old and deeply in love with her
husband, the mother of eight more children after little Eugene had
died, and she was no fool. She knew that the railroad would never give
up on trying to destroy her family and kill her husband. She was
right. The railroad posted a team of spies on Molly’s farm and posted
a reward of ten thousand dollars on her husband’s head – Dead or
Alive. The railroad had basically issued a Death Warrant on a man who
had never been convicted of a crime; on a man for whom they had not
the slightest evidence had ever been near one of their trains, much
less had actually robbed one.

After Chris’s hasty yet necessary departure Molly took on the tasks of
running the family farm and raising eight children, while at the same
time fending off frequent visits from the sheriff and suffering
constant threats and intrusions from the railroad. Chris would
sometimes sneak down to the farm and pay a visit to Molly at night and
then leave before morning light. The railroad detectives also
suspected Molly - and Eva - of sneaking food up to her husband in the
mountains, and although they were very vocal in their accusations they
could never prove anything.  Molly found comfort in the continuous
support of her mother – Grannie Byrd to the children – who lived
nearby in Visalia.

The High Country had called to Chris, offering safety. The Hand of
Fate had steered his return to this High Country; and he and John
Sontag were back up in these mountains that Chris loved so much; back
amongst Chris’s friends who would now move to protect him from those
who pursued him for a chance at quick wealth; back into temporary
safety, but one huge step closer to the cold touch of the Hand of
Glory which would forever scar him. For the Hand of Glory had no
friends; but only victims, and he was now destined to be one.

                                                To be continued in
Part Two . . .